Sex assault survivor who confronted Jeff Flake speaks out
Sex assault survivor who confronted Jeff Flake speaks out
A sex assault survivor who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake inside an elevator Friday — after announcing he would vote in favor of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — said that the likely pivotal...
A sex assault survivor who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake inside an elevator Friday — after announcing he would vote in favor of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — said that the likely pivotal moment “was all kind of a blur.”
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The Minimum Wage Needs An Upgrade
The Minimum Wage Needs An Upgrade
Seventy-eight years ago today, the Fair Labor Standards Act made a groundbreaking promise to Americans: the promise of a fair minimum wage for an honest day’s work.
That promise, however,...
Seventy-eight years ago today, the Fair Labor Standards Act made a groundbreaking promise to Americans: the promise of a fair minimum wage for an honest day’s work.
That promise, however, has eroded badly over time. In recent decades, the federal benchmark has grown increasingly obsolete, guaranteeing a bare minimum that is nowhere near enough to keep up with the growing costs of rent, food, and other essentials.
As calls for higher wages grow louder nationwide, it is imperative that federal officials take action to raise the federal minimum wage and renew the promise to American workers made nearly a century ago.
If the federal rate had merely kept up with inflation since its peak in the late 1960s, it would be nearly $11, one-and-a-half times today’s rate of $7.25. That rate has stayed stagnant since Congress last raised it in 2009. It is a remarkable number of years to go without an increase in wages, and workers have suffered for it.
In the absence of Congressional movement, states and cities have increasingly moved to give workers the raises they need. Yet entrenched forces at the federal level continue to stonewall, putting forth arguments that grow increasingly irrelevant by the day.
Many, for example, raise the specter of job losses. Yet cities that have raised their minimum wage in the past two years, from Los Angeles to Seattle to Chicago, simply have not seen the kinds of cataclysm that many warned about.
In fact, in Seattle, dozens of new restaurants have opened since higher wages kicked in – including many run by one of the fiercest critics of the increase. By the end of 2015, new permits for restaurants, coffee shops, and other food service establishments were on track to keep pace with or even surpass those issued in years past.
Another myth: higher wages would lead to higher prices - a bigger bill for a Big Mac, a pricier trip to Target. Yet here too, the apocalyptic predictions that precede wage increases fail to come true. In Seattle, the costs of groceries, gas, and retail have stayed stable over the past year - even though businesses warned they would need to hike prices if wages were to rise.
In recent weeks, some fast-food chains have made headlines by declaring they would replace employees with automated kiosks. Looking at the bigger picture, though, the overall risks of automation are low. Research just last year found that, while minimum wage increases can reduce some routinized jobs like cashiers, they also swell the number of more complex jobs like food preparation, resulting in an overall zero-sum change.
The fact is, raising the minimum wage gives local economies a boost by putting more money in the pockets of consumers. Higher wages also let businesses hold on to workers and improve customer satisfaction, all of which improve employers’ bottom line.
That’s why the majority of businesses actually support a higher minimum wage, despite the noise coming from groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association. A leaked memo earlier this year showed that 80 percent of business executives around the country support higher wages and paid sick days - and that they are coached to oppose those policies in public.
While powerful interests keep trying to muddle the debate, it’s clear that even a growing economy is simply not reaching millions of hardworking Americans. And it’s not just fast-food workers. A variety of workers receive less than $15: teachers, paramedics, home health-care workers, and many others. A recent study showed that even many manufacturing jobs – the foundation of the middle-class – pay less than $15, forcing the government to cover the gap with public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid.
As minimum wages affect more and more workers, it is no wonder that more Americans are starting to get on board. This year, dozens of cities and states – including some that lean deeply Republican – are considering increases. Colorado, Maine, Arizona and Washington State are all running ballot measures that would raise wages for close to two million workers in those states alone.
Rather than focusing on a fantasy Armageddon that never comes, lawmakers in Congress would do well to embrace the need for better pay. In the meantime, states and cities will continue the fight to fulfill the pledge that the FLSA made so many years ago.
By JoEllen Chernow
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Legal Experts Pan US for Disappointing Human Rights Record
MSNBC - April 17, 2015, by Willa Frej -The United States has a record of human rights abuses despite its position as a leading voice on human rights issues worldwide, legal experts said at a forum...
MSNBC - April 17, 2015, by Willa Frej -The United States has a record of human rights abuses despite its position as a leading voice on human rights issues worldwide, legal experts said at a forum here on Friday, from water shutoffs in Detroit and widespread police brutality to Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes. The alleged abuses include asserting immunity from and not ratifying certain international rights laws and treaties, not joining the International Criminal Court, and supporting governments with abysmal rights records of their own.
Experts at the forum, which took place at Hunter College and previewed the country’s upcoming human rights review by the United Nations, acknowledged that the U.S. is not typically considered an egregious human rights abuser. But a simple look beneath the surface, panelists said, uncovers a staggering range of human rights issues:
Lack of healthcare. Despite the Affordable Care Act’s success in promoting healthcare access, affordable health insurance is not available in many states and not accessible to undocumented immigrants. In a state like Texas, where restrictions sharply limit access to reproductive health, Latina women are twice as likely to contract cervical cancer and 30% more likely to die from it, Katrina Anderson from the Center for Reproductive Rights said.
Water shutoffs. In Detroit, 14,000 households and 38,000 people were without water at the end of 2013, according to Rob Robinson of the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative, after the city implemented a program that shut off water in households that couldn’t pay their bills. More 80% of the city’s population is African American, he added, and 40% live below the poverty line.
Police brutality. The U.S. is now experiencing what it’s like to be both over-policed and under-protected, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Marbre Stahly-Butts argued. From the gripping videos capturing instances of police violence to the ensuing national outrage, there’s a new level of awareness around law enforcement abuses.
The response, which has largely centered around the implementation of body camera use by police, has felt inadequate to many, Stahly-Butts said, especially given the billions of dollars allocated to fighting terrorism overseas. “Why no war on racism?” she asked.
Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, who died as a result of a police chokehold last year, put a human face to the issue. “If there’s a crime, there should be accountability, whether you’re wearing blue jeans, a blue business suit, or a blue uniform,” she said. His tragedy, she said, was her motivation for speaking out on behalf of human rights, specifically urging police to abide by the same laws they enforce.
Indefinite detention and drone strikes. Despite an early push by President Obama to close Guantanamo Bay, 122 men remain in the prison without charge or trial. Fifty-six of these men have been cleared for transfer out of the prison, but just five transfers have taken place so far in 2015. In another counterterrorism offensive, the Obama administration has expanded the drone strike program in Pakistan and Yemen. The Center for Constitutional Rights’ Baher Azmy told the audience that the program has killed more than one thousand civilians since 2002.
Out-of-control surveillance. The U.S. government’s large-scale data dragnet, revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, is inconsistent with the universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to Faiza Patel, a co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. The “collect-it-all” approach to surveillance eviscerates privacy, Patel argued, by allowing the government to listen in on Americans’ phone calls and read text, email and other online messages without sufficient oversight.
Other speakers were more hopeful. Catherina Albisa, a human rights lawyer with the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative, said the U.S. began as a fierce champion of human rights and described an “emerging landscape” of young people and protesters committed to economic justice through human rights. But government commitments to those rights have languished, Albisa argued, noting America’s “manufactured” water crisis and the closing of abortion clinics in Texas as evidence of deteriorating rights for U.S. residents.
Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, co-director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program, went further, suggesting the U.S. government undermines human rights standards. The U.S. is an active participant in the United Nation’s human rights review process, she explained, but the last set of recommendations resulted in zero domestic reforms. That lack of responsiveness could undermine the review’s credibility going forward, she warned.
The U.S. is set to undergo its second United Nations review in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 11.
Source
Equal pay is widely understood to be a feminist issue — so why isn't the Fight for $15?
Equal pay is widely understood to be a feminist issue — so why isn't the Fight for $15?
The idea that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work is probably among the least controversial feminist positions because, in 2017, it's pretty difficult to argue against.
...
The idea that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work is probably among the least controversial feminist positions because, in 2017, it's pretty difficult to argue against.
Hollywood actresses like Patricia Arquette have traded in their standard acceptance speeches for impassioned calls for wage equality, while Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a whole new brand of feminism when she began coaching women on how to combat workplace inequality by "leaning in," making equal pay part of a mainstream dialogue...
Read full article here.
Campaign Zero: A ‘Blueprint for Ending Police Violence’
On Friday, activists with the country’s growing racial justice movement unveiled a new campaign to end police violence, bridging protester demands with data and policy to create structural...
On Friday, activists with the country’s growing racial justice movement unveiled a new campaign to end police violence, bridging protester demands with data and policy to create structural solutions to the crisis that has gripped national attention for more than a year.
Launched as an online manifesto with an interactive website, Campaign Zero proposes new federal, state, and local laws that would address police violence and reform the criminal justice system—including demilitarizing law enforcement, increasing community oversight, limiting use-of-force, and requiring independent investigation and prosecution of police violence cases.
“More than one thousand people are killed by police every year in America,” the group states on its website. “Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless ‘quality of life’ behaviors or mental health crises.”
The action plan also incorporates recommendations by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing as well as those of research organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy. The architects behind Campaign Zero characterized it as a project that will continue to develop over time as new solutions emerge and more supporters come on board.
The four creators of the new campaign and authors of the manifesto—Samuel Sinyangwe, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay McKesson—are co-founders of We The Protesters, which as the Guardian notes is “a prominent section of a wider protest movement that is frequently referred to, in general terms, as Black Lives Matter.”
“This is just the beginning,” they wrote in a statement accompanying the launch.
In the year that has passed since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, police have killed at least 1,083 Americans—an average of nearly three people per day, according to figures compiled by VICE News. Even that figure, released August 9, quickly became outdated.
The policy recommendations also call for an end the controversial practice of “broken windows” policing—a tactic that involves cracking down on petty infractions as a means to prevent more serious crime. The chokehold death of Eric Garner, who was targeted by police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, heightened criticism of the policy, which Columbia law professor Patricia J. Williams said “has intimidated, dispossessed and humiliated millions of innocent people” for two decades.
Campaign Zero launches just as new reports highlight the lack of training and culture of aggression that permeates law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Addressing that issue in another policy demand, Campaign Zero states, “An intensive training regime is needed to help police officers learn the behaviors and skills to interact appropriately with communities.”
The group points to the recent successful overhaul of policing tactics in Richmond, California, a city which reduced its crime rate by 33 percent through community policing.
“We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country,” Campaign Zero states.
Campaign Zero also introduces strategies for charting presidential candidates’ policy positions on such issues. Racial justice activists have recently engaged with the campaigns of candidates including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Jeb Bush to demand action plans on addressing police brutality and criminal justice reform.
“Right now, the country is awake,” organizers stated. “We must continue to leverage this awakening for substantive change. We have an opportunity to change the way that issues in blackness are prioritized in political spaces and an opportunity to redefine how the political process interacts with our communities.”
“America is finally waking up to this very necessary and critical conversation about race, equity, and preserving the life and dignity of all citizens,” Packnett told the Guardian on Friday.
Added McKesson, “This is a blueprint for ending police violence.”
This Common Dreams article is reposted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Source: San Diego Free Press
GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to Kavanaugh's legal opinions and documents from his time in the Bush...
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to Kavanaugh's legal opinions and documents from his time in the Bush administration is "the bare minimum of transparency Americans should expect before confirming a Supreme Court nominee."
Read the full article here.
Education ‘Day of Action’ set Monday in 60-plus cities
The Washington Post - December 6, 2013, by Valerie Strauss - A coalition of education, labor, civic and civil rights organizations, led by the American Federation of Teachers, is staging a “...
The Washington Post - December 6, 2013, by Valerie Strauss - A coalition of education, labor, civic and civil rights organizations, led by the American Federation of Teachers, is staging a “National Day of Action” on Monday with dozens of coordinated events in cities across the country that are aimed at building a national movement to fight corporate-influenced school reform and offer alternative ways to improve public education. The AFT is buying $1.2 million in radio, print and online ads to get out the message.
Protests have been building this year in different parts of the country against the education reform movement that is dominated by the use of standardized test scores as the chief “accountability” metric and school “choice” that has led to the growing privatization of public schools. The AFT says that Monday will be the first time so many events — protest marches, news conferences, and town halls scheduled in 60 cities including Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Austin, Houston and other Texas cities, Boise, Los Angeles and several locations in Florida — have been coordinated to send a message to policymakers that school reform should be focused not on closing schools, punishing teachers and deluging kids with tests but on providing teachers and students with the resources they need to teach and learn.
“Teachers, parents, students and community members are banding together to demand a new direction for public education,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. “In some ways, this Day of Action is years in the making. Parents, students, teachers and community members have been coming together in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York to call out what’s not working and create solutions that do. Text-fixation, austerity, privatization, division, competition are not working for our students – as we saw in the PISA results this week. Our schools need evidence-based, community-based solutions like early childhood education, wraparound services, professional autonomy and development, parent voices and project-based learning. That’s what this Day of Action is about. That’s what reclaiming the promise is about. These are our schools and they need our solutions.”
Dozens of organizations representing parents, educators, clergy, civil rights activists, and community groups are participating in the event, which is being sponsored nationally by these groups: Alliance for Educational Justice, American Federation of Teachers, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Dignity in Schools Coalition, Gamaliel Network, Journey for Justice Alliance, Leadership Center for the Common Good, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign and the Service Employees International Union.
In October, a number of organizations came together to come up with a strategy to build a national movement around shared principles, which you can read find here. Among the principles:
Public schools are public institutions.
Our school districts should be committed to providing all children with the opportunity to attend a quality public school in their community. The corporate model of school reform seeks to turn public schools over to private managers and encourages competition — as opposed to collaboration — between schools and teachers. These strategies take away the public’s right to have a voice in their schools, and inherently create winners and losers among both schools and students. Our most vulnerable children become collateral damage in these reforms. We will not accept that …
Our voices matter.
Those closest to the education process — teachers, administrators, school staff, students and their parents and communities — must have a voice in education policy and practice. Our schools and districts should be guided by them, not by corporate executives, entrepreneurs or philanthropists. Top-down interventions rarely address the real needs of schools or students …
Strong public schools create strong communities.
Schools are community institutions as well as centers of learning. While education alone cannot eradicate poverty, schools can help to coordinate the supports and services their students and families need to thrive. Corporate reform strategies ignore the challenges that students bring with them to school each day, and view schools as separate and autonomous from the communities in which they sit.
• “Community Schools” that provide supports and services for students and their families, such as basic healthcare and dental care, mentoring programs, English language classes and more, help strengthen whole communities as well as individual students …
Assessments should be used to improve instruction.
Assessments are critical tools to guide teachers in improving their lesson plans and framing their instruction to meet the needs of individual students. We support accountability. But standardized assessments are misused when teachers are fired, schools are closed and students are penalized based on a single set of scores. Excessive high-stakes testing takes away valuable instructional time and narrows the curriculum — with the greatest impact on our most vulnerable students.
Quality teaching must be delivered by committed, respected and supported educators.
Today’s corporate reformers have launched a war on teachers. We believe that teachers should be honored. Teaching is a career, not a temporary stop on the way to one. Our teachers should be well-trained and supported. They should be given the opportunity to assume leadership roles in their schools. Highly qualified teachers and school staff are our schools’ greatest assets. Let’s treat them that way …
Schools must be welcoming and respectful places for all.
Schools should be welcoming and inclusive. Students, parents, educators and community residents should feel that their cultures and contributions are respected and valued. Schools that push out the most vulnerable students and treat parents as intruders cannot succeed in creating a strong learning environment. Respectful schools are better places to both work and learn …
Our schools must be fully funded for success and equity.
More than 50 years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that African-American students were being denied their constitutional right to an integrated and equitable public education. We have not come far enough. Today our schools remain segregated and unequal. When we shortchange some students, we shortchange our nation as a whole. It is time to fund public schools for success and equity, for we are destined to hand off the future of our nation to all our young people.
• We must end the practice of funding our schools based on local property wealth. Only when we take responsibility for all our schools, and all our children, will schools succeed for all our society …
The events planned for Monday’s National Day of Action include a town hall in Washington, D.C., at which teachers and parents will develop a community-driven vision for public schools, starting at 6 p.m. at Eastern High School. In New York City, union, community and youth partners fighting to win universal full-day prekindergarten will host a rally marking the start of a joint labor-community campaign to support new education initiatives as part of a “new day for public education in New York City” under Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio.
In Houston, union and community partners will hold a news conference and rally outside the school board offices, where they will call for an end to an overreliance on tests and for fair teacher evaluations. In Chicago, organized parents, teachers and youths will hold a news conference at City Hall and a march to the headquarters of corporate agents such as Loop Capital to demand equitable funding and a public voice in education. In Boise, Idaho, parents, teachers and several community organizations will gather around the state Capitol to support school funding for Idaho public schools, which have some of the lowest state funding in the country.
Here’s how an action in Philadelphia is described on the event list:
A powerful contingent of community and youth groups, parents and labor unions will rally outside Gov. Tom Corbett’s Philadelphia office in coordination with partners in Pittsburgh, followed by a march to the corporate office of Loop Capital, an Illinois bank that has contributed to the privatizing of schools in Chicago and handed out bad interest loans that have crippled Philadelphia’s school system. The union-community alliance is fighting to restore statewide education funding, establish a new equitable education funding formula in 2014, and demand that Loop Capital pay back the bad loans.
The sponsors are the National Day of Action are planning more action in the spring.
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Statement from the Fed Up coalition on Philadelphia Fed’s Announcement of a New President
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 2, 2015
Contact:Ricardo A. Ramírez, rramirez@populardemocracy.org, 202-464-...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 2, 2015
Contact:Ricardo A. Ramírez, rramirez@populardemocracy.org, 202-464-7376
Statement from the Fed Up coalition on Philadelphia Fed’s Announcement of a New President
In response to this morning’s announcement of a new president for the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, Kendra Brooks of Action United in Philadelphia put out the following statement today on behalf of the Fed Up coalition:
“As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System’s governance and decision-making processes should reflect the values of transparency and public accountability. The process that was used to select Patrick Harker as the new President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia failed to do that. Despite repeated requests from community, consumer, labor, and academic organizations and public officials within the region, the Philadelphia Fed refused to create any mechanisms for engagement with the public. Instead, the process was entirely opaque: nobody outside of the Federal Reserve knew who the candidates were or what the criteria was for selection. This process did a disservice to the Federal Reserve System and the people of the Philadelphia region.
“We congratulate President Harker on his appointment and look forward to working with him to build a strong economy for Philadelphia and the region. For too many families within the Third District, the economy still isn’t working: the so-called recovery has featured stagnant wages and not enough good jobs. We are eager to partner with President Harker to change that reality, and to build a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that is accessible to public input and responsive to the public’s needs.”
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“Fed Up” is a national coalition of community-based organizations, unions, and policy advocates calling for the Federal Reserve to adopt policies that create a full employment economy with rising wages and good jobs for everyone and for a reformed Federal Reserve that is transparent and accountable to the public. The Coalition recently met with Fed Chair Janet Yellen and three Fed Governors to discuss its priorities.
It’s true: HUD policy really does hurt our neighborhoods
It’s true: HUD policy really does hurt our neighborhoods
HUD has a program that sells tens of thousands of troubled mortgages across the country, many in black and Latino neighborhoods hard hit by the housing crisis, to Wall Street speculators - at a...
HUD has a program that sells tens of thousands of troubled mortgages across the country, many in black and Latino neighborhoods hard hit by the housing crisis, to Wall Street speculators - at a discount! Please let that sink in.
Since 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been auctioning off pools of very delinquent mortgages through a program they call Distressed Asset Sales Program, or DASP. In most cases, the sales have gone to the highest bidder, which have been hedge funds and private equity firms.
Lone Star Fund, a private equity firm started by a Texas billionaire, and Bayview Asset Management, an affiliate of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, have been two of the primary beneficiaries of these sales. The result? Struggling homeowners lose their homes and speculators turn the properties into high-cost rentals that contribute to displacement in communities across the country.
This month, over 110,000 people from across the country signed a petition calling on HUD Secretary Julian Castro, to change this program. This comes on the heels of a March 1st letter to HUD from 45 members of Congress issuing a similar call for reforms to this mortgage sale program. In fact, for over two years, housing advocates and national policy groups have been pushing HUD to fix this program.
In an interview on WNYC Studio’s “The New York Radio Hour,” Secretary Castro referred to our protests that his program is enriching Wall Street as “sloganeering.” We wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it is simply a fact that 98% of the mortgages sold through HUD’s DASP program are going to Wall Street, one that can be verified on HUD’s own website where they post reports from these sales. Most, if not all, of these Wall Street buyers are what the industry itself calls “vulture capitalists” – investors that specialized in distressed assets in the hopes of making them more profitable and selling them for a profit.
In an effort to suggest that he has addressed the problem, Secretary Castro touts the agency’s 2015 auctions of troubled mortgages in which only non-profits were eligible to bid. Let’s be clear. Only 172 mortgages were sold to non-profits through these auctions, while a whopping 15,309 went to Wall Street investors in 2015. So yes, a gesture was made by the agency, but at such a miniscule scale he surely cannot suggest that the problem is solved.
There is no reason to sell such a high percentage of these loans to some of the same culprits responsible for the housing crisis in the first place. In fact, it seems to be in direct conflict with HUD’s mission to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. Call me skeptical, but I don’t trust a private equity firm like Blackstone – a company whose CEO made $734 million last year - to help fulfill that mission. Blackstone and other major speculators have a goal of making as much money as possible, and in the process are chipping away at the wealth and stability of neighborhoods in the process.
There is a viable alternative, that housing and civil rights groups across the country are calling for. HUD should prioritize selling these loans to good actors that have a community-centered plan to save homes from foreclosure when possible and, when foreclosure cannot be avoided, to meet the affordable housing needs of the community with their property disposition plans.
A growing number of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) have programs to do just this, and have raised the capital needed to buy pools of these delinquent mortgages. But so far, they haven’t been able to get their hands on the number of mortgages that they can afford. HUD should do all it can to make sure CDFIs and other good actors are prioritized for these sales.
I have seen too many people in my community lose their homes and their wealth to Wall Street speculators. We cannot allow the same policies that ravaged our communities to continue. For me the choice is very clear: will Secretary Castro make sure that HUD helps families stay in their homes, or will he allow HUD to continue to sign over these loans to Wall Street and fuel neighborhood displacement?
It’s time for HUD to make the right choice and partner with non-profit CDFIs and other organizations that will keep our neighborhoods together. I encourage everyone who cares about the stability of neighborhoods across the country to join with me in calling on Secretary Castro and HUD to change the DASP program so that it prioritizes foreclosure avoidance and the creation of affordable housing.
By Ana Maria Archila
Source
After minimum wage changes, Bay Area workers push for ‘fair’ scheduling
After minimum wage changes, Bay Area workers push for ‘fair’ scheduling
As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are turning to what they see as another piece of the puzzle for improving workers’...
As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are turning to what they see as another piece of the puzzle for improving workers’ lives: scheduling.
From ensuring workers get the full-time hours they desire, to preventing retaliation against them for turning down last-minute schedule changes, several initiatives are aimed at making employees’ schedules more stable and reducing underemployment.
“Now, it’s about getting fair wages and fair hours,” said Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).
Business interests have railed against the idea of regulating scheduling across diverse sectors, and warn of unintended consequences that could actually hurt workers looking for additional hours and flexibility in their schedules.
Angie Manetti, director of government affairs for the California Retailers Association, said that has already happened in San Francisco since that city’s Retail Workers Bill of Rights was passed last year. Managers now choose to leave shifts unfilled to avoid penalty pay from scheduling workers on short notice, leaving heavier workloads on the employees who are working, she said.
San Jose’s Opportunity to Work initiative, an ordinance on the ballot Nov. 8, would require businesses there to offer extra hours to part-time employees before hiring more workers.
The initiative would apply to businesses with 35 or more employees but exclude government jobs and allow companies to apply for a “hardship” exemption.
Dilsa Gonzalez, a San Jose resident who has held a variety of positions in the fast food sector there, hopes the measure will support people like her. Gonzalez works 16 hours per week, but she would like to work 40. When she asks supervisors for additional hours, they tell her there is no work available.
“But then they hire other people,” Gonzalez said through a translator. She tries other means of making money, including recycling or helping her husband, a mechanic, work. But in San Jose, it’s “hard to survive with just a few hours of work,” she said.
“There is a crisis of underemployment in Silicon Valley,” said Ben Field, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, which gathered the required signatures to place the measure on the ballot. “It’s symptomatic of a problem across the country in which more and more wage earners are dependent on part-time work as a main source of income.”
Matthew Mahood, CEO of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, counters that the San Jose ordinance would “pit workers against each other” for full-time hours rather than creating more jobs and that the ordinance is too far-reaching.
Meanwhile, in the East Bay city of Emeryville, the City Council passed its “Fair Work Week Initiative” last week.
The initiative requires retail and fast food establishments that have more than 56 employees globally to:
• provide employee schedules two weeks in advance of their shifts;
• allow employees to decline schedule changes that happen within seven days of the changed shift;
• offer extra hours to part-time employees before bringing on new ones;
• provide employees with extra pay for taking on shifts on short notice, known as “predictability pay.”
The initiative also would require employers to allow employees to deny back-to-back closing and opening shifts and to request alternate work schedules without retaliation.
Emeryville has often been a trendsetter when it comes to passing worker protection legislation, EBASE’s Lin said. That includes the $14.44-per-hour minimum wage it established last year that at the time was the highest in the nation. She hopes to push the effort throughout the East Bay in the near future.
Moriah Larkins, an Oakland resident who has worked in retail in Emeryville for five years, is among those who say the unpredictability of retail scheduling has made life difficult. As a single mother, Larkins said, taking on last-minute shifts was difficult because child care is not easy to schedule, but she also often did not get scheduled as many hours as she wanted to pay her bills.
She now works at Home Depot, where her schedule is more secure, allowing her to plan better for her family and financially, she said. Home Depot store manager Lionel Stevens said at the City Council meeting that it issues schedules three weeks in advance, and has an open-door policy for employees who need flexibility.
A study commissioned by Emeryville indicates that relatively few workers believe work scheduling has a negative effect on their life. According to the study, 87 percent of employees said they have influence in creating their schedules, and 76 percent said their schedule has never changed with less than 24 hours of notice.
A separate study led by the backers of the Fair Work Week initiative, EBASE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Center for Public Democracy found different results: that more workers — roughly two-thirds — get their schedule less than a week in advance and want to work more hours.
Many workers believe an ordinance is needed to close any loopholes for businesses who are not scheduling fairly.
Kelby Peeler, a Union City resident who worked at Barnes and Noble for seven years, said he would often be scheduled 30 hours one week and 10 the next, making it impossible to plan financially, and he often lost sleep with late-night closing shifts paired with opening shifts the next day.
“There are definitely good actors — it’s not like every store is having these problems,” Peeler said. “But you can’t have your schedule based on the whim of a manager.”
By ANNIE SCIACCA
Source
7 days ago
7 days ago